The World’s Most Expensive Cheese
The World’s Most Expensive Cheese : The world’s most expensive cheese weighs in at five hundred dollars per pound. Now you might be imagining that this cheese contains unusual ingredients, such as chocolate or comes from a really rare animal such as the Wagyu cow, but that is not the case. The world’s most expensive cheese comes from domestic moose. The moose produce milk as soon as they calve in May and continue until September when they go into heat. Each one thousand one hundred pound moose can produce one gallon of milk per day. It can take up to two hours to milk a moose by hand, although some moose can be milked in as little as thirty minutes. The labor intensiveness of the milking process as well as the limited amount of milk produced is one of the reasons why the cheese is so expensive.
Weighing in at fifty-five dollars per pound, is Bitto, a cheese made from a combination of cow and goat milk in the Italian Alps. The reason Bitto sells for so much is that cheese makers claim the goat milk comes from an extremely rare breed of goat known as the orobic got, and that all of the milking of both animals is done manually. The orobic goat is a breed that is at risk of extinction. The cow’s milk comes from the Brown Swiss Cow. The cheese is made from June until September and at an altitude of at least 1,500 meters. Once the wheels of cheese have been made, they are soaked in a salt brine overnight, then the aging process begins. Bitto is aged on oak boards for a minimum of seventy days. The longer the cheese is aged, the better it is and there are varieties of Bitto that have been aged for ten years or longer, of course, the longer the aging process, the higher the price.
If moose or goat cheese is not for you, how about trying an award winning blue-veined cow’s cheese? Gorau Glas, made in Anglesey, Wales sells for forty dollars per pound. The production of this soft blue-veined cheese is limited but many traveling food lovers stop by the farm to check out the Welsh cheese which claims to be the first of its kind. The production process itself is quite labor intensive. The cheese must be turned repeatedly during the long maturation times. Piercing of the cheese is also required so the blue veins can grow which ultimately allows the flavor and texture of the cheese to develop. Gorau Glas cheese has taken several prestigious awards over the past several years, including the bronze award in 2005 at the British Cheese Awards, there were variousreviewsand it was also the first, second and third place winner in 2004 at the Nantwich Cheese Festival, in 2005 the cheese took the gold award and the small producers bronze award at the Nantwich Cheese Festival and in 2006. At the same festival, the cheese won the vegetarian cheese gold and the Danisco Trophy for Best Vegetarian Cheese Champion.
